Friday, March 14, 2003

Off topic. I'm having a problem getting the Timex Data Link software to run on our new XP machine. I keep getting an error message about wrong date format. I've tried changing the date in settings. I've tried using the compatibility wizard, looking at the Timex site and searching for active discussion groups. No luck. Anyone have a solution? I like this watch and use it often. I'd hate to lose it, but do not want to keep the old computer just to set the watch.

I have avoided speaking about politics because that was a limit I placed on myself when I began this 'blog. The time has come to bend if not break that self-imposed restriction. As catalogers, we try to provide access to materials. Our discussions about main entry, ISBD punctuation and other minutia are based on Cutter's reasons for a catalog, to help a user find .... Currently, there is a feeling, by some, that security must be purchased by sacrificing our 1st amendment rights. There are secret courts approving searches, gag orders, and the FBI in the library. Last week the most common search of Catalogablog was "FBI", so it seems there is concern in our profession about this problem. These blocks to access fly in the face of our most basic principles.

The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics. [Seen on Teleread.]

Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we've noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to "chill" legitimate activity.

The new act would radically diminish personal privacy by removing checks on government power. It would permit, without any connection to anti-terrorism efforts, sensitive personal information about U.S. citizens to be shared with local and state law enforcement. In addition, the government could gain secret access to credit reports without consent and without judicial process.

Thursday, March 13, 2003

OntoLog is a tool for annotating (describing and indexing) video and audio using ontologies - structured sets of terms or concepts. It used RDF and the Dublin Core. This is a PH. D. project by Jon Heggland. He is looking for testers and users.

For OntoLog and my doctoral degree to be a success, I need the ideas, requirements, critique and feedback of (potential) OntoLog users. OntoLog, though usable and useful, is not finished - there are lots of things I want to do. But I want to anchor the capabilities of OntoLog in the real world.

Therefore, I am looking for people who use digital video or audio professionally, who might benefit from using a tool such as OntoLog, and who has opinions on the requirements of such a tool. OntoLog is currently being used for analysis of video recordings recording human behaviour, but this is not the only possible application for OntoLog. I imagine media scientists, linguists, documentarists, anthropologists and journalists might benefit from OntoLog, and there are certainly numerous applications I can't think of. I can offer you a media annotation tool that grows steadily more powerful, free support, and a say in its further development; in return I want ideas for new or improved functionality, feedback on user interface and design, and examples of real-life applications of OntoLog's ontology-based annotation paradigm.

NISO has released part 1 of the proposed OpenURL Standard titled "The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services, Part 1: ContextObject and Transport Mechanisms". This document defines the general framework to bundle specific packages of contextual metadata and transport them over the network. The public-comment period starts on March 12th and will last until April 15th.

These recommendations are not primarily targeted at the end-users of eprint archives. Rather, they are intended to guide 'best-practice' for the maintainers of eprint archives in order that such systems can be configured to maximise the benefits of a shared approach to metadata disclosure. The intention is to facilitate more consistent results when 'cross-searching' and browsing metadata records gathered from multiple eprint archives. Nonetheless, we would hope that these guidelines to have some impact on the cataloguing guidelines and help sub-systems offered to end-users of institutional eprint archives.

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

The Internet Book List (IBList) is a hobby project started by Patrik Roos in early 2003. Its purpose is to provide a comprehensive and easily accessible database of books, since Patrik considers the Book to be humanity's greatest creation. With the help of a few kind friends, he hopes that the project will grow into something even better.

Monday, March 10, 2003

The latest Information Outlook has the article "Happiness Is Taxonomy: Four Structures for Snoopy" by Katherine Bertolucci. It examines the problems in LC and Dewey classification schemes, in a particular case. She then offers an alternative.

The Weblog MetaData Initiative has opened a SourceForge project for WMDI, and has uploaded the .PHP files for the Ecosystem as well as the .SQL files necessary to create the appropriate database schema. This is the beginning of the real open source phase of WMDI. Now folks will be helping evolve the current code into a robust and stable "WMDI Server".

An UDDI repository containing information on web services with public sector data.

It is the vision that it will be possible from this website to look up all public data interface descriptions, and gain information about what data are available and how data are accessed. The gain of a central location for public data will be easy access to already collected data and the re-use of these. Thereby the public administration will be easier and cheaper. The Infostructurebase is a part of the Danish XML project.